That whole heroic notion of the women warriors known as Amazons is extremely appealing. It was appealing in antiquity, and, throughout the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, they're always portrayed as heroic, courageous, and the equals of men, and that's just extremely attractive and has been since antiquity.
Adrienne Mayor
We are certainly influenced by role models, and if we are surrounded by images of beautiful rich people, we will start to think that to be beautiful and rich is very important - just as in the Middle Ages, people were surrounded by images of religious piety.
Alain de Botton
When learning was monopolized by the monks in the Middle Ages, people specialized only in warfare and statecraft. And even these were not altogether free from the scholastic influence.
Ameen Rihani
We owe to the Middle Ages the two worst inventions of humanity - romantic love and gunpowder.
Andre Maurois
The trouble with us is that the ghetto of the Middle Ages and the children of the twentieth century have to live under one roof.
Anzia Yezierska
The technology that threatens to kill off books as we know them - the 'physical book,' a new phrase in our language - is also making the physical book capable of being more beautiful than books have been since the middle ages.
Art Spiegelman
Grounded in the natural philosophy of the Middle Ages, alchemy formed a bridge: on the one hand into the past, to Gnosticism, and on the other into the future, to the modern psychology of the unconscious.
Carl Jung
Real socialism is inside man. It wasn't born with Marx. It was in the communes of Italy in the Middle Ages. You can't say it is finished.
Dario Fo
During the Middle Ages, Jews were members of a semi-independent polity within a larger polity.
David Novak
Some have called we rock and roll performers who never retire 'troubadours.' I enjoy this misnomer immensely. While there are many differences between me and my distant predecessors in L'Occitane, I do believe there is a lineage that connects us of the last 70 years with those romantic singers of the High Middle Ages.
Frank Black
The tendency to gather and to breed philosophers in universities does not belong to ages of free and humane reflection: it is scholastic and proper to the Middle Ages and to Germany.
George Santayana
No student of history can fail to see the moral interest of the Middle Ages, any more than an artist can fail to see their aesthetic interest.
Goldwin Smith
Yet for my part, deeply as I am moved by the religious architecture of the Middle Ages, I cannot honestly say that I ever felt the slightest emotion in any modern Gothic church.
There is a spell in mediaeval Art which has had power to bewitch some people into trying, or wishing to try, or fancying that they wish to try or making believe to fancy that they wish to try, to bring back the Middle Ages.
If it were a real effort to live in the Middle Ages, your life would be one perpetual prevarication.
But if anyone supposes that there was no commercial fraud in the Middle Ages, let him study the commercial legislation of England for that period, and his mind will be satisfied, if he has a mind to be satisfied and not only a fancy to run away with him.
The story of 'Mirror Mirror' is in many ways a story about evolution. It's about the evolution of a child into an adult. It's about the evolution of those dwarves into something a little less rock-like, a little more humanoid. It's about the evolution of history, too, from the darkness of the Middle Ages into the light of the Age of Reason.
Gregory Maguire
I would go from one city to the next, inspired by the monks in the Middle Ages, who would carry knowledge from one monastery to the next monastery.
Hans-Ulrich Obrist
The institution of chivalry forms one of the most remarkable features in the history of the Middle Ages.
Horatio Alger
It flourished with the Saracens, and suffered in the obscure and fanatical days of the Middle Ages.
Isaac Mayer Wise
Had the Hebrews not been disturbed in their progress a thousand and more years ago, they would have solved all the great problems of civilization which are being solved now under all the difficulties imposed by the spirit of the Middle Ages.
The Romans had been able to post their laws on boards in public places, confidant that enough literate people existed to read them; far into the Middle Ages, even kings remained illiterate.
In the Middle Ages and beyond, the target was the Court Jew who had the ear of the ruler; during the Inquisition it was the Spanish Jews who thrived after their conversion to Christianity.
The year 2008 was a reminder to those who had forgotten that there is such a thing as history and that the cycle of famine and feast in commerce, first identified in antiquity and well understood in the Middle Ages, was not suddenly abolished in modern times.
In my mind, if you went back to the Middle Ages, in Italy they'd be speaking Middle Age Italian. And at that point, it would obviously be indecipherable for us, but for the people of that time, it was just normal talking.
For us, when we think about the Middle Ages, it's sort of this rarefied, distant time that we have no connection to, especially if you grew up in America.
I attribute the quarrelsome nature of the Middle Ages young men entirely to the want of the soothing weed.
For three hundred years we have had our focus on the individual. We have distinguished him from the objective world as the Middle Ages did not think of doing. We have given him the world and the universe as a playground for exploration and discovery.
Various Turkish people invaded southwest Asia during the Middle Ages and carved an empire for themselves from lands occupied by the indigenous Semitic and Indo-European inhabitants.
We reserve the term 'genius' for people who are creative, who are innovators, who think in ways that are entirely new. In the Middle Ages, the term 'genius' was reserved for people with the best memories. That is telling.
Since at least the Middle Ages, philosophers and philologists have dreamed of curing natural languages of their flaws by constructing entirely new idioms according to orderly, logical principles.
During the Middle Ages they understood that words accompanied by imagery are much more memorable. By making the margins of a book colorful and beautiful, illuminations help make the text unforgettable. It's unfortunate that we've lost the art of illumination.
The genius of 'Game of Thrones' is that in this rich imagining of a world redolent of the medieval, the rules of a Middle Ages morality play have been so thoroughly discarded.
'Simeon's Gift' is really - it's about a musician who - in the Middle Ages, who goes out to find his muse.
In the Middle Ages, I think the French kings murdered slightly fewer of their family members than the English kings, though I haven't actually counted the heads.
We forget how bawdy and brutal the Middle Ages were.
Musically, there's a movement called the flatted fifth that's really evil-sounding. It was outlawed by the Catholic Church during the Middle Ages. That movement is what gives you a real evil sound that conjures up dark, fantastic images. It's like an audio horror movie. It personifies what a horror movie is about.
It is not architectural achievement that makes the structures of earlier times seem to us so full of significance but the circumstance that antique temples, Roman basilicas, and even the cathedrals of the Middle Ages are not the works of single personalities but creations of entire epochs.
There is something dark and wintry about the atmosphere of the later Middle Ages.
Modern as the style of Pascal's writing is, his thought is deeply impregnated with the spirit of the Middle Ages. He belonged, almost equally, to the future and to the past.
There was an ingredient used in perfumes and remedies in the Middle Ages called 'momie' that is certainly one of the most fascinating I've come across.
The scientific-rational mindset is as much a cosmology as the Catholic mindset was in the Middle Ages; scientists are so proud of their mindset and convinced that it's the only reality. I find that worrying.
I don't think that we are completely dominated by what we have inherited from the past, but it is the case that as far back as you can go - just to Homer, but also to the literature of Rome, the literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance - what you will find is that women's voices are not taken seriously.
Throughout the European Middle Ages and Renaissance, Latin was the language of learning and international communication. But in the early modern period, it was gradually displaced by French. By the eighteenth century, all the world - or at least all of Europe - aspired to be Parisian.
Beginning under the Roman Empire, intellectual leadership in the West had been provided by Christianity. In the middle ages, who invented the first universities - in Paris, Oxford, Cambridge? The church.
Everyone has this notion of the Middle Ages - certainly the early Middle Ages - as being this very superstitious era. I think that all eras are superstitious. We all have our magical thinking.
Rioting has always been a London tradition. It has been since the early Middle Ages. There's hardly a spate of years that goes by without violent rioting of one kind or another. They happen so frequently that they are almost part of London's texture.
When I rather guiltily read the books on which the TV series 'Game Of Thrones' is based, I was struck by one thing. The whole point of this saga is that ruthlessness pays, that evil generally wins, that justice is non-existent, and utter cynicism the only wisdom. It is the Middle Ages without the saving grace of Christianity.
Morally, the world is both better and worse than it was. We are worse off than in the middle ages, or the 17th and 18th centuries, in that we have the atomic menace.
In the middle ages people were tourists because of their religion, whereas now they are tourists because tourism is their religion.
